QUICK VIEW - Saylor Academy

© The Art Story Foundation – All rights Reserved For more movements, artists and ideas on Modern Art visit www.TheArtStory.org

QUICK VIEW: Synopsis

Georges Seurat is chiefly remembered as the pioneer of the Neo-Impressionist technique

commonly known as Divisionism, or Pointillism, an approach associated with a softly

flickering surface of small dots or strokes of color. His innovations derived from new

quasi-scientific theories about color and expression, yet the graceful beauty of his work is

explained by the influence of very different sources. Initially, he believed that a great

modern art would show contemporary life in ways similar to classical art, except that it

would use technologically-informed techniques. Later he grew more interested in gothic

art, and popular posters, and the influence of these on his work make it some of the first

modern art to make use of such unconventional sources for expressive effect. His success

quickly propelled him to the forefront of the Parisian avant-garde. His triumph was short-

lived, as after barely a decade of mature work he died aged only 31. But his innovations

would be highly influential, shaping the work of artists as diverse as Van Gogh and the

Italian Futurists, while pictures like Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte

have since become widely popular icons.

Key Ideas

• Seurat was inspired by a desire to abandon Impressionism's preoccupation with the

fleeting moment, and instead to render what he regarded as the essential and

unchanging in life. Nevertheless, he borrowed many of his approaches from

Impressionist, from his love of modern subject matter and scenes of urban leisure,

to his desire to avoid depicting only the 'local', or apparent, color of depicted

objects, and instead to try to capture all the colors that interacted to produce their

appearance.

• Seurat was fascinated by a range of scientific ideas about color, form and expression.


He believed that lines tending in certain directions, and colors of a particular

warmth or coolness, could have particular expressive effects. He also pursued the

discovery that contrasting or complementary colors can optically mix to yield far

more vivid tones that can be achieved by mixing paint alone. He called the

technique he developed 'chromo-luminism', though it is better known as

Divisionism (after the method of separating local color into separate dots), or

Pointillism (after the tiny strokes of paint that were crucial to achieve the

flickering effects of his surfaces).

• Although radical in his techniques, Seurat's initial instincts were conservative and

classical when it came to style. He saw himself in the tradition of great Salon

painters, and thought of the figures in his major pictures almost as if they were

figures in monumental classical reliefs, though the subject matter - the different

urban leisure pursuits of the bourgeois and the working class - was fully modern,

and typically Impressionist.

• In Seurat's later work he left behind the calm, stately classicism of early pictures like

Bathers at Asnières, and pioneered a more dynamic and stylized approach that

was influenced by sources such as caricatures and popular posters. These brought

a powerful new expressiveness to his work, and, much later, led him to be

acclaimed by the Surrealists as an eccentric and a maverick.

DETAILED VIEW: Childhood

Georges Seurat was born in Paris December 2, 1859, the youngest of three children. His

father, Chrysostome-Antoine Seurat, was a bailiff; his mother, Ernestine Faivre, came

from a prosperous family that had produced several sculptors. Seurat's eccentric father

had already retired with a small fortune by the time Seurat was born, and he spent most of

his time in Le Raincy, some 12 kilometers from the comfortable family home in Paris.

The young Seurat lived with his mother, his brother Émile, and his sister Marie-Berthe.

In 1870 the family temporarily relocated to Fontainebleau, where they stayed during the

Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent Paris Commune rebellion. Seurat began to take

a serious interest in art as a boy and was encouraged by informal lessons from his

maternal uncle, Paul Haumonté, a textile dealer and amateur painter.

Early training

Seurat's formal training began around 1875, when he entered the local municipal art

school under the sculptor Justin Lequien. There, he made a friend of Edmond Aman-Jean

(1858-1935) and together they entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts run by Henri Lehmann,

a disciple of the Neo-Classical painter Ingres.

Seurat attended the Academy from February 1878 until November 1879. The curriculum

placed particular emphasis on drawing and composition, and most of Seurat's time was

spent sketching from plaster casts and live models.

Seurat spent his free time conducting his own artistic studies and frequently visited

museums and libraries throughout Paris. He also sought instruction from the painter


Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whose specialty was large-scale classical, allegorical scenes .

Seurat's sketches dating to 1874 include copies of Holbein's drawings, a sketch of

Poussin's hand from the acclaimed self-portrait in the Louvre, and figures from drawings

by Raphael.

Charles Blanc's The Grammar of Painting and Engraving (1867) and Michel-Eugène

Chevreul's The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors (1839) introduced Seurat

to theories color and the science of optics that became central to his thinking and practice

as a painter. Chevreul's discovery that by juxtaposing complementary colors one could

produce the impression of another color became one of the bases for Seurat's Divisionist

technique.

In April 1879, Seurat visited the Fourth Impressionist exhibition. This was the first time

he had seen their paintings and the work of Monet and Pissarro, artists liberated from the

rigidities of academic rules, greatly influenced his later experimentation. But in

November his military service started in Brest, where he devoted all his spare time to


reading and filling sketchbooks with studies of fellow recruits, seascapes and street

scenes.

In the following years, Seurat extended his understanding of color theory, and the effects

of color on the human eye. He also studied the brushwork of Romantic painter Eugène

Delacroix and read Ogden N. Rood's Modern Chromatics (1879), which proposed that

artists should experiment with color contrast by juxtaposing small colored dots to see

how they are blended by the eye.

Mature Period

Seurat began to apply his theoretical research to compositions executed between 1881

and 1883, culminating in his first major painting project, the Bathers at Asnières. This

monumental canvas depicted a group of workers relaxing by the Seine and was based on

numerous small oil sketches and figure studies. The final composition is an accomplished

rendition of the light and atmosphere of high summer. It is largely rendered in a criss-

cross brush-stroke technique known as balayé and was later re-touched by Seurat with

dots of contrasting color in certain areas.

Seurat submitted Bathers to the state sponsored Salon in 1883, but the jury rejected it.

Subsequently, Seurat and several other artists founded the Société des Artistes

Indépendants, enabling him to exhibit Bathers in June of 1884. There he met and

befriended fellow artist Paul Signac who was greatly influenced by Seurat's techniques.


After the Bathers Seurat began work on Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand

Jatte, a mural-sized painting that took him two years to complete. Many times the artist

visited La Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine located in the Parisian suburb of Neuilly,

making drawings and more than thirty oil sketches to prepare for the final work. In the

winter 1885-86 he reworked the painting in the technique that he called "chromo-


luminarism", also known as Divisionism or Pointillism. This technique uses dots of

contrasting color that, when viewed at a distance, interact to create a luminous,

shimmering effect. He also repainted sections of the Bathers in the same style around

1887.

Seurat exhibited the Grande Jatte at the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition in May 1886. Its

visual effects of light and color, as well as its complex representation of different social

classes established Seurat as the leader of a new avant-garde.

Late Period

The exhibition of La Grande Jatte in 1886 unexpectedly aroused interest in Seurat's work

internationally. Soon after the exhibition, Seurat was mentioned in an avant-garde review

and some of his paintings were shown by the renowned art dealer Durant-Ruel in both

Paris and New York City.

During this time he began associating with a very enclosed group of Symbolist artists and

writers based in Paris. His new associations troubled his friends Pissarro and Signac, who

believed he was forsaking the pure study of color and light in favor of idealized subjects.

Seurat's last major works depict Paris nightlife and all share a similar muted palette that

differs greatly from the vibrancy of his earlier paintings.

Apart from a brief period of renewed military service in summer 1887, Seurat spent his

summers on the Normandy coast, painting seaside scenes of Honfleur in 1886, Port-en-

Bessin in 1888, Le Crotoy in 1889 and Gravelines in 1890. In winter he finished these

paintings and produced large figure compositions. Although executed in his Pointillist

style, the dots tended to be finer and more spaced out, giving the paintings a more

spontaneous appearance.

In 1889, Seurat traveled to Belgium, where he exhibited at the Salon des Vingt (XX) in

Brussels. After returning from this trip, he met Madeleine Knobloch, a 20-year-old

model, and started secretly living with her. Knobloch gave birth to a son in February

1890, unbeknownst to his friends and family.

At his exhibition in the Salon des Indépendants the same year, Seurat showed his only

known portrait of Madeleine Knobloch: Young Woman Powdering Herself.

Madeleine Knobloch was pregnant again at the beginning of 1891, while Seurat was at

work painting The Circus. This painting would remain unfinished. On March 26, Seurat

fell suddenly ill with a fever and died three days later. His son died of a similar illness on

April 13, and was buried alongside Seurat in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Legacy

Seurat was only 31 when he died, yet he left behind an influential body of work,

comprising seven monumental paintings, hundreds of drawings and sketches, and around

40 smaller scale paintings and sketches. Although his oeuvre is relatively small in

quantity, it had a lasting impact. He was among the first artists to make a systematic and

devoted use of color theory, and his technical innovations influenced many of his peers.


When the term Neo-Impressionism was coined, by art critic Félix Fénéon in 1886, it was

to describe Seurat, Signac and Pissarro's new style of painting and their rejection of the

spontaneity of Impressionism.

Poised between Impressionism in the 19th century, and Fauvism and Cubism in the early

20th, Neo-Impressionism brought with it a new awareness of the surface qualities of

painting, and of decorative effects, thereby contributing to the development of

abstraction.

Seurat is often cited by artists with an interest in the visual effects of color, form and

light. Painter Bridget Riley has credited him with influencing her particular brand of Op

Art.

ARTISTIC INFLUENCES:

Below are Georges Seurat's main influencers, and the people and ideas that he influenced

in turn.

ARTISTS

CRITICS/FRIENDS

MOVEMENTS

Puvis de Chavannes

Ingres

Nicolas Poussin

Eugène Delacroix

Felix Feneon

Camille Pissarro

Claude Monet

Edouard Manet

Impressionism


Georges Seurat Years Worked: 1874 – 1891

ARTISTS

CRITICS/FRIENDS

MOVEMENTS

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Vincent Van Gogh

Paul Gauguin

Bridget Riley

Edgar Degas

Paul Signac

Post-Impressionism

Pointillism

Op Art

Quotes

"Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science."


"Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each

artist."

"Painting is the art of hollowing a surface."

Major Works:

Bathers at Asnières, Georges Seurat, 1883, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

Oil on canvas

Seurat's first important canvas, the Bathers is his initial attempt at reconciling classicism

with modern, quasi-scientific approaches to color and form. It depicts an area on the

Seine near Paris, close to the factories of Clichy that one can see in the distance. Seurat's

palette is somewhat Impressionist in its brightness, yet his meticulous approach is far

removed from that style's love of expressing the momentary. The scene's intermingling of

shades also demonstrates Seurat's interest in Eugene Delacroix's handling of shades of a

single hue. And the working class figures that populate this scene mark a sharp contrast

with the leisured bourgeois types depicted by artists such as Monet and Renoir in the

1870s.


Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte, Georges Seurat, 1884-86, Art Institute

of Chicago, Chicago

Oil on canvas

Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte was one of the stand-out

works in the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, in 1884, and after it was shown

later that year, at the Sociéte des Artistes Indépendents, it encouraged critic Félix Fénéon

to invent the name 'Neo-Impressionism.' The picture took Seurat two years to complete

and he spent much of this time sketching in the park in preparation. It was to become the

most famous picture of the 1880s. Once again, as in Bathers, the scale of the picture is

equal to the dimensions and ambition of major Salon pictures. The site - again situated on

the Seine in northwest Paris - is also close by. And Seurat's technique was similar,

employing tiny juxtaposed dots of multi-colored paint which allow the viewer's eye to

blend colors optically, rather than having the colors blended on the canvas or pre-blended

as a material pigment. The artist said that his ambition was to "make modern people in

their essential traits move about as they do on [ancient Greek] friezes and place them on

canvases organized by harmonies." But the classicism of the Bathers is gone from La

Grand Jatte; instead the scene has a busy energy, and, as critics have often noted, some

of the figures are depicted at discordant scales. It marked the beginning of a new

primitivism in Seurat's work that was inspired in part by popular art.


La Seine à la Grande-Jatte, Georges Seurat, 1888, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of

Belgium, Brussels

Oil on canvas

La Seine à la Grande-Jatte of 1888 shows the artist returning to the site of his most

famous painting - A Sunday on La Grande Jatte painted two years prior. This later

composition demonstrates Seurat's continued interest in form and perspective, but reveals

a much softer and more relaxed technique than La Grande Jatte. The soft atmosphere is

made up of a myriad of colored dots that mix optically to mimic the effects of a luminous

summer day.


Young Woman Powdering Herself, Georges Seurat, 1888-1890, The Courtauld Institute

of Art, London

Oil on canvas

Young Woman Powdering her Face is a portrait of Seurat's mistress Madeleine

Knobloch. It is an adoring likeness that jokingly contrasts the classical monumentality of

the figure against the flimsy Rococo frivolity of the setting. It is also strongly marked by

Seurat's increasing interest in caricature and popular art, sources which helped him lend a

new expressiveness to his work which accorded with the growing contemporary interest

in Symbolism. Knobloch was a working-class woman with whom Seurat maintained a

long term secret relationship, keeping her separate not only from his bourgeois family but

also from his bohemian friends. When the painting was shown in 1890, her identity

remained concealed. Knobloch was given some of Seurat's paintings as an inheritance but

she cut off all communication with his family after his death.


Circus Sideshow, Georges Seurat, 1887-88, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Oil on canvas

Circus Sideshow is considered one of Seurat's major figure paintings. Yet it is much more

condensed than his other mural-size paintings. This was Seurat's first nocturnal painting

and it debuted at the 1888 Salon des Indépendants in Paris. It depicts a ringmaster and

musicians under twinkling gaslight who are attracting a crowd of potential ticket buyers.

The composition was drawn from on-site sketches he made in the spring of 1887, when

Frenand Corvi's traveling circus performed in Paris (it appeared regularly in Paris

between the 1870s and the First World War). Though Seurat frequently attended circus-

like events in his leisure time, this painting was the first important picture Seurat

dedicated to a scene of popular entertainment. The pattern of circles, ovals and rectangles

in the background has attracted much notice from critics, as many of the forms are hard

to explain in terms of the structure of the setting. It has been argued that they derive from

Seurat's understanding of various contemporary theories of expression, which advocated

the use of particular forms and colors to convey particular types of emotion.


The Circus, Georges Seurat, 1890-1, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Oil on canvas

Seurat's early paintings often feature a remarkable stillness, even with complex figure

compositions, but The Circus features a scene of dynamic movement, and is typical of his

late style. The scene is borrowed from an anonymous poster for the Nouveau Cirque,

printed in 1888, although the horse and bareback rider have been reversed. The figure in

the first row of seats, with a silk hat and a lock of hair visible under it, is the painter

Charles Angrand, a friend of Seurat's. This painting was Seurat's last, and was left

unfinished when he died suddenly in March of 1891. It was sold shortly thereafter to his

friend Paul Signac.

QUICK VIEW - Saylor Academy

Documents

Transcript of QUICK VIEW - Saylor Academy